Gregory Rabassa, a Premier Translator of Spanish and Portuguese Fiction, Dies at 94

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Gregory Rabassa with the manual typewriter that he used to do his work. Professor Rabassa’s translation of “One Hundred Years of Solitude” became a best seller.CreditChester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

Gregory Rabassa, a distinguished translator from Spanish and Portuguese who brought the work of luminaries like Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa to a wide English-speaking public, died on Monday in Branford, Conn. He was 94.

His family confirmed the death.

A longtime faculty member of Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Professor Rabassa was widely considered one of the foremost translators of any kind in the world. He was known in particular for making the wave of dynamic and powerful fiction, much of it magic realist, that emerged in Latin America in the 1960s and afterward — a literary phenomenon known there as “El Boom” — accessible in English.

Foremost among those novels was “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” Mr. García Márquez’s epochal multigenerational saga, first published in the author’s native Colombia in 1967. Professor Rabassa’s critically acclaimed translation, issued in the United States in 1970, marked the inaugural appearance in English of both the novel and its author.

The novel, in Professor Rabassa’s rendering, became a best seller. Mr. García Márquez, who publicly described Professor Rabassa as “the best Latin American writer in the English language,” received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982.

Writing in The New York Times, John Leonard reviewed “One Hundred Years of Solitude” — which centers on the fortunes of the mythical South American town of Macondo and includes such spectacularly routine phenomena as ghosts, mass insomnia and tumbling clouds of butterflies — calling it “superbly translated.”

He further called the novel, in an encomium that speaks to the translator’s skill as well as the author’s, “a cathedral of words, perceptions and legends that amounts to the declaration of a state of mind.”

Professor Rabassa’s other Spanish-to-English work includes the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar’s novel “Hopscotch,” for which he won a National Book Award for translation in 1967; “The Green House” and “Conversation in the Cathedral,” by Mr. Vargas Llosa, a native of Peru; and Mr. García Márquez’s “Leaf Storm and Other Stories” and “The Autumn of the Patriarch.”

From the Portuguese, he translated the work of the Brazilian writers Jorge Amado, Clarice Lispector and Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis and the Portuguese writer António Lobo Antunes.

Professor Rabassa was also a masterly commentator on the singular pleasures and perils of the translator’s art. He enumerated them in 2005 in a memoir, “If This Be Treason: Translation and Its Dyscontents,” whose subtitle reflects the etymological underpinnings of that curiously spelled word.

His renown in the field was even more striking in that he had never intended to become a translator at all.

The son of Miguel Rabassa, a sugar broker from Cuba, and the former Clara Macfarland, a New Yorker, Gregory Luis Rabassa was born in Yonkers on March 9, 1922. He was reared on a farm in Hanover, N.H., where his father, after the decline of the Cuban sugar market in the 1920s, had become a hotelier.

Wishing to assimilate, his father used English almost exclusively. “He only spoke Spanish when he cut himself,” Professor Rabassa told an interviewer in 2007.

But Gregory Rabassa fell in love with the language as an undergraduate at Dartmouth, from which he earned a bachelor’s degree in Romance languages. He went on to earn a master’s in Spanish and a doctorate in Portuguese, both from Columbia.

In World War II he served with the Office of Strategic Services as a cryptographer in Italy and North Africa.

Professor Rabassa planned to pursue a life of quiet scholarship. He taught at Columbia from the late 1940s to the late 1960s, when he joined the Queens faculty, from which he retired in 2007.

In the early ’60s, he edited Odyssey Review, a literary journal featuring new writing from Europe and Latin America. His English translations in its pages came to the attention of an editor at Pantheon Books, who asked him to render Mr. Cortázar’s “Hopscotch,” about an Argentine exile’s search for the meaning of existence, into English.

Mr. Cortázar was so pleased with the result that he told Mr. García Márquez to commandeer Professor Rabassa for “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”

To build his cathedrals of words, Professor Rabassa required scant raw materials: “The book, a dictionary, a pile of paper,” as he told The Times in 1981.

Labor was another matter. It is the translator’s lot to be afflicted with chronic, Talmudic agonizing — over sound, over sense, over meter, over meaning. With “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” for instance, the torment began with the first word of the title.

In Spanish, the novel is called “Cien Años de Soledad,” with “cien” meaning “100.”

But there’s the rub, for the translator into English confronts an instant quandary: whether to translate “cien” as “a hundred” or “one hundred.”

Professor Rabassa was an ardent believer in the aurality of text. To him, “a” was an acoustic flyspeck, little more than a fleeting grunt. He chose the more durable “one.”

In “If This Be Treason,” Professor Rabassa traced his path through the web of contingencies that ensued, starting with the phrase “pelotón de fusilamiento”:

“There are variant possibilities,” he wrote. “In the British Army it would have been a ‘firing party,’ which I rather like, but I was writing for American readers.” He added:

“I chose ‘remember’ over ‘recall’ because I feel that it conveys a deeper memory. ‘Remote’ might have aroused thoughts of such inappropriate things as remote control and robots. Also, I liked ‘distant’ when used with time.”

Confronting the devilish verb “conocer,” Professor Rabassa continued:

“The word seen straight means to know a person or thing for the first time, to meet someone, to be familiar with something. What is happening here is a first-time meeting, or learning. It can also mean to know something more deeply than ‘saber,’ to know from experience. García Márquez has used the Spanish word here with all its connotations. But to ‘know ice’ just won’t do in English. It implies, ‘How do you do, ice?’ It could be ‘to experience ice.’ The first is foolish, the second is silly. When you get to know something for the first time, you’ve discovered it. Only after that can you come to know it in the full sense.”

The evocative published result: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

Among the other authors Professor Rabassa translated, with their attendant pleasurable torments, were Miguel Ángel Asturias, the Guatemalan writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1967, and the Spaniard Juan Benet.

Professor Rabassa had homes in Manhattan and Hampton Bays, on Long Island. His first marriage, to Roney Edelstein, ended in divorce. His survivors include his second wife, the former Clementine Christos, whom he married in 1966; a daughter, Kate Rabassa Wallen, from his first marriage; another daughter, Clara Rabassa, from his second; and two grandchildren.

His other honors include the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation, the Wheatland Prize for Translation, the Alexander Gode Medal from the American Translators Association and the National Medal of Arts.

For all his acclaim, Professor Rabassa disavowed reviewers’ accounts of his linguistic prowess: It was the skill of the author, he insisted, that had half the battle won for him before he took up his pen.

“If it’s a good book,” he told The Times in 1974, “the translator has to be a butcher to kill it. If it’s a great book, even a clown can make it come true.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B9 of the New York edition with the headline: Gregory Rabassa, Noted Spanish Translator, Dies at 94. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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